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by Pete Lowman
2005

After all, if we believe in God, then we have solid grounds to believe in our own value. Sometimes it’s hard, but it’s logical: we know we are worth so much to God, loved so enormously, that the Father sent His own Son to die for us. But now we have learned that all that is myth, and we are products and guests only of a blind, arbitrary process. For millions of years it has bubbled away, and now, for a few short years, we have our spell in the sunlight. What does that say about us? French philosopher Sartre: ‘All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man as an object… in no way different from the patterns… which constitute a table or a chair or a stone.’ It happens that we can walk and talk, but fundamentally that does not alter what we are: chance objects of no inherent value in a chance universe..

by Pete Lowman
2005

The philosophers saw it coming first: the contemporary crisis of pointlessness, of directionlessness, after the loss of God. ‘The passing days, the wasted sensibility’: to what extent is that our contemporary experience? One of the greatest British novelists, Joseph Conrad, described our destiny bleakly in Heart of Darkness as a ‘mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose’. What is worth doing? What am I living for?

by Pete Lowman
2005

In a culture more closely based on the Bible, it was possible to know what was right or wrong, what God had ordained. Then we lost God. What followed? For if the final reality is the evolutionary struggle; and if that struggle is basically about the survival of the fittest, and the strong surviving at the expense of the weak; how far does that leave us with any real moral case against the threat of fascism, as our century closes? Was that not the argument of Nazism: that the Jews were a degenerate people, therefore their destruction by a stronger race was in tune with the course of nature? Why then was Hitler wrong?

by Pete Lowman
2005

The loss of God may hit even closer to home… What’s the meaning of love after God? Often, as our artists grapple with these issues, they have turned finally to loving relationships as that which survives when everything has collapsed. Matthew Arnold wrote of the loss of Christian faith in Dover Beach; the “sea of faith”, he says, “was once… at the full… but now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar…”